With Relation to different natural disasters, discuss their impacts and how they may vary between LEDC's and MEDC's.

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Introduction

With Relation to different natural disasters, discuss their impacts and how they may vary between LEDC's and MEDC's. The risk from natural is increasing all the time, more hurricanes, and floods are predicted to result from global climate change. At the moment, on average, each year natural disasters leave around 4 million people homeless and kill 128,000 people world wide, this is not even taking into consideration the damage that they perform in the process, and the cost that this causes the worlds economy. Each year the developing countries accept $35 billion dollars in damages caused by natural disasters from the rest of the world. There is little doubt that natural disasters have a significant impact on the world, whether developing or already developed. The extent to of this effect will always depend on several things, where about in the world that the hazard occurs is the main factor i.e. a developed or developing country. This can determine how prepared the area that it occurs is, and so how bad the impact on the country is, because obviously almost always the more prepared a country is for an event, then the less drastic it will be when it finally hit, as they can take adequate precautions to try and prevent it causing complete devastation. Not only will this differ in the two countries, but also the knowledge of the public will change, again disadvantaging the less developed countries. So in order to try and answer the question posed I will need to look at a variety of different hazards that affect us, I will include earthquakes, volcanoes and tropical cyclones. ...read more.

Middle

This kind of scheme would be almost impossible to implement in a country like India, where the communications are much less evolved, and there is no central way to communicate between people. The next hazard that I am going to look at is the Tropical Cyclone, or Hurricane, and I am going to look at the specific example of Hurricane Mitch, which blew its way across Honduras, and central America, an area that in general is quite poor, and would be mostly considered as a LEDC. A major problem with hurricanes, is although you can predict that they are going to hit land, and you can see when they have formed, you cannot predict the path that they are going to take very accurately at all, in fact it is almost impossible, as they can suddenly, without warning change direction for no reason, so that any prediction over 72 hours in advance, and usually less than that is extremely unreliable. However it is not for lack of trying, as America for many years have been trying to use state of the art technology to predict the paths of the many hurricanes that hit them each year. They use information from geostationary satellites, and land based monitoring sensors, and fly surveillance flights in to potential tropical cyclones to try and help them learn more. This technology is simply not available to poorer countries, as they could not possibly afford to finance such things. Hurricane Mitch began around 28th October in the Southern Caribbean sea, the country of Honduras was on e of the worst hit, with around 6000 people killed, and approximately 19,000 altogether dead, or missing. ...read more.

Conclusion

The economy was hit drastically with about 60000 people loosing their jobs, costing the country billions in lost profits. So looking at all of these different example of various natural disasters the effects of them in different countries certainly varies quite widely, even if the effects and death toll are higher in the developing countries the damages caused still often cost more in the developed countries, simply because there was more 'money' there to damage in the first place. In each developed country almost every house has several TV's a stereo and many other, what we consider to be basic household items which will mean that in the event of a natural disaster the amount of insurance and damage for each household is significantly more than that of any house in a less developed country. The technology and communications between people in MEDC's far outstrips that of other poorer countries, and so the people are infinitely more prepared for crisis like these, and will have warning, often, far before it actually occurs. All these things add to the reasons why the impact of disasters vary between the two examples of countries, and why some devastate some countries and leave other virtually untouched, even if they have the same characteristics. It is why the death toll in one country can be extortionate for a minor event, while at the other side of the world there can be few casualties for something much more drastic. However it is not the final deciding point and there are other things to consider which can important in deciding how serious it may get, but it is definitely an issue. Rachael Coar ...read more.

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